Gold bracteate

This early and unique
bracteate
was a stray find made by a farmer in Suffolk. The figural images
were adapted from a Late Roman Urbs Roma coin of a type issued by
Constantine the Great between AD 330 and 335. The coins have a
helmeted head of the emperor on the obverse and Romulus and Remus
being suckled by a wolf on the reverse, which the maker of this
bracteate has conflated. Such coins were widely circulated and the
artist must have copied an
heirloom.

Above the two
images is a double spiral followed by a runic inscription that can
be transcribed as 'gæ go gæ – mægæ medu'. Recent
research proposes that the these may be read as 'howling
she-wolf' (a reference to the wolf image) and
'reward to a relative'. The runes are Anglo-Frisian
and it is likely that the bracteate was made in Schleswig-Holstein
or southern Scandinavia and brought to England by an Anglian
settler. Short runic inscriptions such as this are typical of the
use and extent of writing in the pre-literate Germanic societies.
In early Anglo-Saxon England, even after the introduction of the
Roman alphabet, runes continued to be used on a popular level for
magical and amuletic inscriptions, as well as for sophisticated
riddles.